Monday, December 15, 2014

For my Final piece, I made an audio tour. My tour is a meditative piece, taking the listener through the imagination. The piece, "A Tour of a Familiar Place" starts with a solo voice reciting a few guidelines to follow during the tour. After that is finished, the listener is requested to close their eyes. Once that has been done, the voice begins to guide people by saying vague descriptions. The descriptions are suppose to help the listener to imagine some place they have been. While this is going on, music is playing to help enhance the performer. The music is set to pan in different directions to lead the listener to different places. The piece ends with the person taking time to appreciate their destination, and opening their eyes when they are ready. The tour was inspired by Alter Bahnhof Video Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. After watching that video in class I had decided I wanted to make an audio tour that could be interpreted any way, but like in Cardiff and Miller's piece led you through a fantastic place. I enjoyed the visuals and music of their pieces. I also was inspired by the teachings of feldenkrais. Feldenkrais is suppose to be a meditative teaching that helps one learn about how their body should move. I took the mood of Feldenkrais and mixed it with the tour aspect of Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.

For my gallery viewing I went to a graduate student in composition, Tim Chatwood,'s graduate recital. He had a few pieces that were just instrumental, but for the most part he had video to accompany his work. For his first piece, Blurred Lines on McCarran, the video was of different streets along the border between Reno and Sparks. Each part of the video accompanied the piece of music very well. For his piece 21 Hit of Improvised Ensemble, he had a folder of 21 pictures and used chance to randomly pick two pictures, then the ensemble below played an improvised piece based around the pictures they were looking at. This was very similar to our visual scores, but it also used the chance aspect. This was not the only instance of improvisation in Tim's recital. Later, his piece An Improvised Outcome, he has a video set up of someone painting and the painter has to make marks depicting the music that was being played. Overall Tim's recital had a mix of music and video that blended well together. His pieces showed influence of John Cage with his use of chance and minimalism. The musicians all performed well and some of Tim Chatwood's pieces from the evening are being showcased at a few composers festivals around the US.